Mobile Navigation System for the Elderly - Preliminary Experiment and Evaluation

The aging of society is emerging as a global problem. Participation of elderly people in social activities is highly desirable in several perspectives of the society. Thus, we propose a mobile service that supports elderly people wishing to go out and promotes their participation in social activities. This system collects information on the existence of nearby barriers and provides timely information to users via a mobile phone equipped with GPS. The nearby barriers include not only permanent barriers such as stairs, but also temporary ones such as crowds and parked bicycles. Further, we propose functionality that selects and informs barrier information suitable for each user. This paper illustrates the public experiment that we conducted in Tokyo, and confirms the accuracy of the information filtering.